The Hots A drug for women seek­ing to boost their flag­ging li­bido

Just to show not all Eureka mo­ments turn out rosy, it’s now near three years since the United States’ Food and Drug Ad­min­is­tra­tion ap­proved Ad­dyi, the brand name for flibanserin, a pill that was dubbed the “fe­male Vi­a­gra”. So how has the drug fared since then? Not too well. Un­like Vi­a­gra, which men take on an as-needed ba­sis for erec­tile dys­func­tion, Ad­dyi treats hy­poac­tive sex­ual de­sire dis­or­der (the most com­monly re­ported form of fe­male sex­ual dys­func­tion) but women have to take it ev­ery day, re­gard­less of whether they’re plan­ning to have sex or not. It’s also not as sim­ple in its ef­fi­cacy as Vi­a­gra (which just in­creases blood flow to the pe­nis), as it works on brain chem­istry. So where Vi­a­gra sold al­most 600,000 pre­scrip­tions in its first two months, Ad­dyi sold just 227. Sure, num­bers have im­proved since then but not enough, and the drug­maker that bought the rights to Ad­dyi for 1 bil­lion USD (just two days after it won FDA ap­proval) has just de­cided to give it back to its orig­i­nal own­ers, along with an ad­di­tional 25 mil­lion USD loan fa­cil­ity, and all they want in return is 6 per cent of fu­ture sales. Now, that can’t be a good sign, can it?